[00:00:00] And welcome back. So a long overdue discussion about common language. I’ll take some time over the next coming weeks to put together an episode of just my thoughts on the five elements each. I’m talking about common language first, and that’s what we’re getting into today long overdue. And this is kicked off by a conversation that I had with a new friend.
[00:00:27] And I’ll tell the entire story about that. But first common language, the common language is not just the base language that we use to be able to enter into a conversation, right? That’s English . Common language is the thing that makes it work. The thing that makes the conversation be communication, the thing that makes it possible for us to collaborate on the ideas that we’re sharing and getting into and collaboration is the key, right?
[00:00:55] Cause if it’s not collaboration, then I’m just talking to a wall. If it’s not collaboration, if you are not on the other end of this microphone right now, and obviously it’s not right now, you’re listening to this some other time. If you’re not on the other end of this microphone, then I’m not collaborating with anyone.
[00:01:15] I’m not creating anything. I’m just talking to myself and that’s true every single time you enter into any conversation, if you’re not looking for collaboration, you’re just talking to yourself. Why? Because ask yourself this. Has anyone ever engaged with you and just talked, talked at you just filled the air with talking.
[00:01:43] How did you feel? How did that experience make you feel about the person that was talking at you? Did you feel like you were a part of a conversation?
[00:02:04] It’s happened to me? In fact, I’ve probably been the one doing it in previous life. So I’m much more careful now, much more careful to make sure that a conversation that I enter into is a collaboration that we’re creating ideas together and sharing them that we’re building something in order to arrive at something that we’re at least for that very small period of time, a community of at least two, me and the person I’m speaking with, not at with.
[00:02:40] When this happened to you and you felt like you weren’t part of the conversation. How did you react? Did you react by being pushy by being louder? Throwing your ideas at the other person, did that create a collaborative environment? Was it a conversation? Sometimes people are open to being disrupted and that disruption gives them an opportunity to reconsider the moment.
[00:03:12] And it’s a beautiful thing, but not always. And when you started responding to the fact that you weren’t part of that conversation, it was a conversation of one, happening at you, not with you. When you started responding to that, did that person respond to your disruption with openness and collaboration, or did they respond to your disruption in the same manner that they started that engagement?
[00:03:40] I’m bringing these ideas up so that you can really center in the notion that all conversations are a collaboration. They are a collaboration. They’re in an opportunity to work together and the successful conversations that opportunity is taken and run with. And that’s part of the reason why common language is so valuable.
[00:04:03] It’s not just about speaking English as I just centered into your brain. There’s lots of scenarios where speaking English does not a conversation make. The lack of collaboration, results in no conversation, it results in no exchange of ideas. It results in no growth, not for you, not for them. And that’s not what we want.
[00:04:32] Is it, do we want to have to be disrupted ourselves by the person we’re speaking at, in order for them to be able to enter into the conversation? No, we don’t want that. I don’t want that. Do we want to have to disrupt the person who is speaking at us in order to enter into the conversation? No, we don’t want that.
[00:04:58] I don’t want that. I want that community. I want it always to be collaborative, sharing an opportunity for us to come together and bring ideas to the table and just speaking English, doesn’t do that. Now, of course, we might have the most common language. We might be the oldest of friends and still be talking past each other.
[00:05:21] So just common language doesn’t do it either. There’s lots of other elements as we’ve mentioned that make that community work. Today we’re talking about common language. Have you ever noticed that when you’re speaking with your oldest friend, when you’re speaking with your parents communication, on the things that you are comfortable talking about in that relationship, communication just flows.
[00:05:48] It feels like it’s so easy to pass an idea through the other person just gets you. That is the feeling you get when you have true common language. Again, it’s not just English. It’s that the communication flows it’s that the exchange of ideas is easy. You have inside stories, you have ways of saying things.
[00:06:16] In fact, you have inside sayings. Inside my family for example, we talk about masks. Now, you can probably sit there and think of seven different ways or 10 different ways masks could be part of the common language of the Lucas Root family. We talk about masks. And when I talk about masks, I don’t have to explain the ideas that are surrounding masks inside the context of a conversation with my family.
[00:06:49] We also talk about demons, but when we talk about demons inside my family, we’re not talking about the thing in purgatory or in hell. We’re not talking about horn devils. We’re talking about something else. And it’s something that we understand very well inside the family. So I can just mention masks and continue carrying forward.
[00:07:11] And there’s an enormous amount of connotation that’s brought into that conversation. Just with that one word, common language. That’s what makes common language beautiful. It doesn’t create friendships. It comes from friendships. It doesn’t create positive working environments. It comes from positive working environments.
[00:07:37] And it makes them easier. It makes them easier to carry forward. It makes them easier to engage in. It makes them easier to reengage in who do you rather talk to the people who get you quickly or the people you have to spend forever figuring out how to actually communicate with them. I mean, the truth is we all need new people in our lives.
[00:08:01] So the answer is both. I want to talk to both of those people. I want to talk to my old friends. I want wear my old worn out jeans. I want to talk to my new friends. I want to go to the new jeans store. Right? I want both.
[00:08:15] And talking to new friends helps me challenge my ideas and refine my language and build new pathways. Talking to my old friends helps me engage in those ideas and go deep. And by going deep, I get to reconsider from a new perspective of love and trust.
[00:08:39] And that’s where common language gets us. It gets us deep. It gets us deep quickly. So we don’t spend an entire night trying to arrive there. And that’s not a bad thing. I’ve done that recently an entire night with a new friend building common language, time well spent. Absolutely.
[00:09:05] Now. Let me talk about this scenario, this experience, this beautiful thing that happened for me recently, that reminded me that I need to come on here and talk with you about common language. So I met this new friend, an amazing man. I’m going to try to get him onto my podcast. We sat down for a coffee date.
[00:09:30] Now coffee dates are what half an hour, 20 minutes long. We sat there for four hours. It was lovely. It was wonderful. It was one of the best coffee dates I have ever had four hours long. Wow. Now here’s, what’s extraordinary. Not just that. It was four hours long. What’s extraordinary is that every single topic that we engaged in, we spent at least 20 minutes, truly, at least 20 minutes talking past each other two intelligent, educated, successful entrepreneurs.
[00:10:13] Both of us sitting down with open hearts and open minds. Engaging in conversation about topics that we both love. And it took us at least 20 minutes on each topic for us to be able to realize where our common language was because we were using such different words, we’re both native English speakers.
[00:10:40] We were using such different words and such different phrases. The way that we built the ideas inside our head and the language we used to talk to ourselves about. It was so vastly different that it took us 20 minutes of engaged conversation. The first topic we were dealing with was manifestation. It seems like manifestation has really simple language.
[00:11:06] It seems like anyone who’s engaged in manifestation should be able to come together and have really good conversations about it very quickly. There’s strong common language in manifestation turns out that’s not the case. Turns out it took us 20 minutes just to get to the point where we understood what the other person was talking about.
[00:11:30] Example, we were talking about manifesting abundance. And how do you frame the manifestation to receive the abundance that you want. Now I said, you need to have a very clear relationship with you, your higher self and the universe, or God. A very clear relationship, the language that you use needs to be well established so that when you ask for something your higher self in God, do a good job of giving the thing that you’re asking for.
[00:12:08] Makes sense. Yeah. And he said, amazing, amazing comment. I love it. I’m still unpacking it. He said, I feel like you don’t need to worry about that because it’s guided by feeling. Hm. Okay. So what if I ask for manifestation and I wake up the next morning and the kitchen is filled wall to wall. Every single surface covered with ants.
[00:12:38] Is that not abundance? And he sat back and he goes, yeah, I mean, I suppose that is abundance, but I don’t feel like that’s what I would get if I guided my request with feeling. Cause I get a specific feeling when my kitchen is filled with ants and it’s different from the feeling that I’m asking for when I ask for abundance, it took us 20 minutes of talking about that exact metaphor ants in the kitchen for us to realize that he uses feeling as his common language between himself as higher self and God.
[00:13:20] He uses feeling as the common language. I get it. I do get it. And we were engaged in deep. We were really listening. We were really taking in the idea from the other person and we were just missing the mark for 20 minutes, like 20 minutes. I know it’s hard to believe.
[00:13:43] And we didn’t walk away feeling unsatisfied. We didn’t walk away saying God, what a waste of time that was, we actually walked away saying that was amazing. I loved that. I loved that conversation. I loved the refining of my ideas, the refining of my approach, the opening of new pathways to discuss this thing with somebody.
[00:14:08] Both of us. We both loved it. That’s part of the reason why, even though we were talking past each other, we were able to do it for four hours because we could see the goodness, the engagement, the collaboration of the other person, even though our common language was sorely missing English was not enough.
[00:14:39] You can have a beautiful conversation and have a really, really hard time communicating. I know because of the beautiful gift that that experience brought into my life. A wonderful conversation with an awesome person that you just feel bubbly about meeting and not be communicating. We were collaborating, but we weren’t communicating. It took so long. It took so long for us to understand each other’s common language for us to build a common language between us.
[00:15:31] So that’s common language and that’s the reason why common language is so powerful. That’s the reason why common language is the number one element on the five elements. They aren’t necessarily stack ranked, but common language comes first. Because the truth is collaboration without common language is just too hard.
[00:15:58] If I sat down with him again in a week and it took us again four hours to have a half hour deep conversation, I am willing to bet that that would put a lifespan on our relationship. Not because he doesn’t like me and certainly not because I don’t like him, but because it’s just too hard, it’s too hard, it’s too much work. There aren’t very many days that I’m willing to have a four hour conversation with a business partner or a very close friend just in order to explore one idea or two, unless the exploration is really deep.
[00:16:43] And really vast, unless the idea is a big one and we’re going super, super granular. And we’re building things from that. Not just trying to understand each other that will create a lifespan. It’s too hard. Life is complicated and we have other opportunities to have good conversations and we will take them not because I don’t like him.
[00:17:11] Not because he doesn’t like me, but because that’s just the nature of life, I’m gonna have the conversations with the people, with whom I can collaborate.
[00:17:26] And so will you build common language first, build common language with your partners, build common language with your family, your closest friends, build common language with your coworkers. Don’t talk at them. Don’t just talk with them. Build that common language, learn from them, how they need to receive ideas and help them understand how you need to receive ideas.
[00:18:06] Build common language with your businesses, build common language with your audience.
[00:18:16] Invite them to be enrolled in the conversation, invite them to be engaged in the conversation, invite them to collaborate in the conversation. And when they collaborate you do too.
[00:18:36] Thank you. I hope this has been useful. Common language is so important. Understanding that common language is so important. I can’t stress this enough, building that understanding with every single person that you are collaborating with faster is so important. You will avoid misunderstandings when you know that you’re talking past each other.
[00:19:04] When you see it, when you look for that, you will avoid misunderstandings that ruin relationships, you will avoid misunderstandings that damage your business prospects. You will avoid misunderstandings that drive away your audience. If you understand that the words that you use may mean something different to the person receiving them than what you intended build that common language so that when you deliver the receiver receives what you expected.
[00:19:39] There’s that old consulting comic. Where there’s a list of pictures. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And the first one is what you described to the consultant. And the second one is what the consultant heard. And the third one is what the consultant actually built. And the fourth one is when the consultant built it, what you received.
[00:20:02] And the fifth one is, what you are testing. It’s a game of telephone and the game of telephone is fun, exciting, and funny, except when it costs you money and relationships and business, as an example, that what you said is not necessarily what the other person heard, and it’s not just mishearing. It’s also misunderstanding because I could say the word run.
[00:20:33] And you might be imagining that I’m talking about putting on my jogging shoes and going outside, or you might be imagining that I’m talking about presiding over a meeting, or you might be imagining that I’m talking about kicking off a program in my computer. All of those use the word run. I run for exercise.
[00:20:53] I run a program, I run a meeting and when I use the word run, the people that receive that word from me. Each understands it a little bit differently, maybe a lot differently. And it is the process of building common language between you and the person with whom you are speaking that makes collaboration even possible.
[00:21:20] Thank you. Thank you very much. I cannot wait for our next.
